Garden Update: Almost the weekend
From the Archives
The first tulip to bloom!
I seem to have become obsessed with the vegetable side of gardening. I wonder if that has anything to do with food anxiety—like, "If this COVID thing goes on for months, will we have any food??" I'm sure I'm not the only one with that thought because all of my favourite online garden sites have temporarily stopped taking orders. It's only for a little while, they tell us, until they can catch up with the deluge of orders they got once people realized they would be stuck at home for weeks with nothing to do. Well, at least the flowers seem to be doing okay on their own. I'll just have to wait to put in new bedding plants.
In the 10'x12' greenhouse garden (so-called because it's the garden bed closest to the greenhouse), I finally got the 25 strawberry plants in the ground. This was a huge undertaking because we had been walking over that section while we built the compost bin system and it had pretty much dried into concrete. I spent a couple of days forking it over, then raking it and pulling out stones and roots until I had a reasonable tilth. I then mounded, added compost and went to work putting the bare root strawberries in place.
This is the same bed with the new Crabapple tree and the Rhubarb. I'm still dithering about what I'll put in the middle but I think an herb garden is the front runner.
In the greenhouse itself, things are happening... some faster than others.
The corn germinated but the climbing beans have taken off! True leaves are out and I swear they grew three inches in one day. I'm concerned that I'll have to put them out too early. But maybe not. We are in the "sunny south" after all -- Don't laugh! That's what we call it.
Here's a list of everything sown (or planted) in the greenhouse since the Equinox:
Sweet peas
Sugar snap peas 'Nairobi'
Oregon Sugar pod peas
Regular peas
Climbing beans (Blauhilde)
Sweet corn
Buttercup winter squash
Rainbow chard
Lettuce 'Roxy' – I just HAD to!
Lettuce 'Matilda'
Dwarf beans 'Helios' and 'Maxi'
Runner beans 'Enorma'
Comfrey (nowhere near as much as I need though!)
Lemon balm (from the free little Lidl peat pots)
Thyme (from the free little Lidl peat pots)
Delphinium
Tomatoes, 'Gardener's Delight',
Basil
Cape gooseberries
2 Dahlias
Cornflowers
Courgettes from a free MiracleGro peat pot
Cucumbers from a free MiracleGro peat pot
And out in the upper level of the garden, we sowed a bee-friendly wildflower patch -- but I might need to get some yellow rattle to keep the grass from regrowing there. The question is, will I be able to get those seeds if the online seed sellers aren't taking orders.
I think I will have to turn my attention to the flowers tomorrow. If I don't weed those beds soon, I'll have three times the work later—by which time I'll be too busy putting out all those vegetables!